I've never had any experience with 3G dongles, and I must confess I approached plugging one into my Dell Mini with some trepidation. I'd heard scare stories of faffing with config files and other horribleness. I remembered a whopping four page feature in Linux Format on "how to get 3G dongles working." I mean - four pages. That means it certainly wasn't going to be easy...
I recently broke the USB wireless dongle I use on my eight year old Linux running laptop PC. Without it, the laptop can't connect to the internet. Hmm.
Windows was slow, and whilst I felt that re-installing Windows XP might help, Muffin is only a 900Mhz Celeron with 384meg of RAM and a 20Gb hard drive. And I don't like Windows (although XP is far better than Vista) - I'm a Linux user and have been for years. And it was time for Muffin to get a conversion.
Well I finally have persuaded Ubuntu Dapper to give me sound. After delving around in the depths of the Ubuntu forums, I finally found a thread where someone had realised the issue was a faulty sound module in the Ubuntu default kernels. One roll your own kernel later, and here I am with sound! As I type, I'm blasting out some Sigur Rós in celebration!
Last night I left the computer ugrading itself up to the latest version of Ubuntu. Okay I didn't quite leave it to do everything - actually I had to sort it out a few times in the middle of the night, but that's only because I was checking it whilst I was struggling to sleep due to the heat.
